Short Stories, vol 2 | Page 7

a glass of wine to drink and that Serval had told
me the history of its people. The father, an old poacher, had been killed
by the gendarmes. The son, whom I had once seen, was a tall, dry
fellow who also passed for a fierce slayer of game. People called them
"Les Sauvage."
Was that a name or a nickname?
I called to Serval. He came up with his long strides like a crane.
I asked him:
"What's become of those people?"
This was his story:
When war was declared the son Sauvage, who was then thirty-three
years old, enlisted, leaving his mother alone in the house. People did
not pity the old woman very much because she had money; they knew
it.
She remained entirely alone in that isolated dwelling, so far from the
village, on the edge of the wood. She was not afraid, however, being of
the same strain as the men folk--a hardy old woman, tall and thin, who
seldom laughed and with whom one never jested. The women of the

fields laugh but little in any case, that is men's business. But they
themselves have sad and narrowed hearts, leading a melancholy,
gloomy life. The peasants imbibe a little noisy merriment at the tavern,
but their helpmates always have grave, stern countenances. The
muscles of their faces have never learned the motions of laughter.
Mother Sauvage continued her ordinary existence in her cottage, which
was soon covered by the snows. She came to the village once a week to
get bread and a little meat. Then she returned to her house. As there
was talk of wolves, she went out with a gun upon her shoulder--her
son's gun, rusty and with the butt worn by the rubbing of the hand--and
she was a strange sight, the tall "Sauvage," a little bent, going with
slow strides over the snow, the muzzle of the piece extending beyond
the black headdress, which confined her head and imprisoned her white
hair, which no one had ever seen.
One day a Prussian force arrived. It was billeted upon the inhabitants,
according to the property and resources of each. Four were allotted to
the old woman, who was known to be rich.
They were four great fellows with fair complexion, blond beards and
blue eyes, who had not grown thin in spite of the fatigue which they
had endured already and who also, though in a conquered country, had
remained kind and gentle. Alone with this aged woman, they showed
themselves full of consideration, sparing her, as much as they could, all
expense and fatigue. They could be seen, all four of them, making their
toilet at the well in their shirt-sleeves in the gray dawn, splashing with
great swishes of water their pink-white northern skin, while La Mere
Sauvage went and came, preparing their soup. They would be seen
cleaning the kitchen, rubbing the tiles, splitting wood, peeling potatoes,
doing up all the housework like four good sons around their mother.
But the old woman thought always of her own son, so tall and thin,
with his hooked nose and his brown eyes and his heavy mustache
which made a roll of black hair upon his lip. She asked every day of
each of the soldiers who were installed beside her hearth: "Do you
know where the French marching regiment, No. 23, was sent? My boy
is in it."
They invariably answered, "No, we don't know, don't know a thing at
all." And, understanding her pain and her uneasiness--they who had
mothers, too, there at home--they rendered her a thousand little services.

She loved them well, moreover, her four enemies, since the peasantry
have no patriotic hatred; that belongs to the upper class alone. The
humble, those who pay the most because they are poor and because
every new burden crushes them down; those who are killed in masses,
who make the true cannon's prey because they are so many; those, in
fine, who suffer most cruelly the atrocious miseries of war because they
are the feeblest and offer least resistance--they hardly understand at all
those bellicose ardors, that excitable sense of honor or those pretended
political combinations which in six months exhaust two nations, the
conqueror with the conquered.
They said in the district, in speaking of the Germans of La Mere
Sauvage:
"There are four who have found a soft place."
Now, one morning, when the old woman was alone in the house, she
observed, far off on the plain, a man coming toward her dwelling. Soon
she recognized him; it was the postman to distribute the letters. He
gave her a folded paper and she drew out of her case the spectacles
which she used for sewing. Then she read:
MADAME SAUVAGE: This letter is to tell you